Richmond-based author Faith Gardner admits she has always been drawn to darker subject matters, and that is reflected in her books. LYNN CAREY/PHOTO

There is much that is relatable with 18-year-old Vera Rivers. For one thing, she’s a local girl, living in Berkeley. The landmarks give Bay Area readers a comfortable jolt of recognition when certain streets or parks are mentioned.

And she’s about to go college in Oregon and can’t wait to leave her family.

Normal, right? Could be anyone.

But the narrator of Faith Gardner’s “The Second Life of Ava Rivers” (Razorbill, $17.99, 361 pages) is a twin, and somewhere in the streets of Berkeley, her sister Ava went missing on Halloween 12 years earlier. Her family shattered. Her older brother felt to blame, since he was supposed to be watching them but wanted to party with his friends. He has since left home and become an addict. Her mother busies herself with exercise and charity work. Her father remains holed up in his basement, running www.FindAvaRivers.com, following up tips that go nowhere.

Vera wants a normal life, to go out in public and not be recognized as the twin of the girl who went missing. She packs her suitcases for college. And then Ava Rivers shows up in a hospital in Fremont, thrown from a moving car. Her father leaves the basement, her mother spends more time at home, her brother visits more often. Vera doesn’t go to college, staying home to reacquaint herself with her twin.

Author Faith Gardner isn’t a twin, but has a large, loving family, most of whom live in the East Bay. Gardner, 35, has two daughters — a 3-year-old who’s about to start preschool and an 8-month-old baby. She’s known her husband since they went to high school together in Goleta. Both are in bands; Gardner sings and plays guitar.

Normal, right?

But Gardner admits she’s been obsessed about missing children since Polly Klaas disappeared in 1993.

“She was a year older than me,” she says, sipping coffee at Catahoula on Berkeley’s San Pablo Avenue. “Her face was everywhere in the news, and the story was so horrifying – that someone could be at a slumber party with her friends and be kidnapped at knifepoint.”

The young Gardner pored over all the news coverage, and after Klaas’ body was found, she continued to read all the missing person stories in newspapers. “They disturbed me and scared me, but I couldn’t look away,” she says.

As a result, Gardner says her biggest fear growing up was death, “my own death, just the thought of not existing.”

Her reading material probably didn’t help. “Flowers in the Attic” by V. C. Andrews was her favorite. “Such a terrifying book, but I loved it when i was young. I’ve always been drawn to dark stuff.”

Did they keep her awake at night?

“They did not!” she says, laughing.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Gardner is also fascinated by ghosts. “I’ve never seen one, but I’m fascinated by the paranormal and other people’s ghost stories. Before we had kids, my husband and I would stay in haunted houses.”

“Ava Rivers” is Gardner’s second young adult novel; her first, “Perdita,” came out three years ago and features a high school girl whose older brother drowned, as did her sister’s best friend a decade later. A ghost — or something — haunts her.

The voice of Gardner’s teenage girl narrator is astonishingly authentic. When told this, she just laughs. “It’s because I never grew up, and I’m very immature.” She still loves reading YA books, and has a few of her own son the back burner, as well as an adult novel that will be – yep, a ghost story.

Gardner says she has always wanted to be a writer, and she came by it honestly. Her mother and father were both journalists, themselves children of newspaper publishers in Kentucky and Riverside County in Southern California.

“When I was a kid, my mom would sit down with me and copy down my stories before I knew how to write,” she says. “I’d draw the pictures, and my mom would make them into little books.”

Gardner’s mother Susan is now the executive editor of the news team at political blog Daily Kos, and Gardner is the social media director. She’s able to work from home most of the time, but her fiction writing is usually done after her kids are down for the night; she writes on her laptop in bed.

And spare time on weekends is often spent with her siblings at her parents’ home in Berkeley or a brother’s house in the Oakland hills or at her own home in Richmond. That’s what she would most like readers to take away from “The Second Life of Ava Rivers” — the magic of family.

“The power of coming together and feeling like you have your people in your life — it can transcend everything else, including the worst tragedies and traumas you can imagine,” she says. “That’s the thing that makes everything worthwhile.”